pedanther

Rock of Ages has opened, and ran for two very successful weekends -- it was going to be three, but then several key cast members tested positive for covid. So there's been a hiatus, and the final weekend will be next week instead, if nothing else befalls us. Covid aside, it's been a lot of fun, with a cast and crew who have got on really well together.

Speaking of the covid, I have had a run-in. I got off fairly lightly; apart from one really rough day and night (for a value of "really rough" that didn't extend to needing to leave the house or seek medical assistance), it was mostly just achiness and fatigue and annoying coughing and sniffling. I didn't even end up taking any days off work (which is a desk job that I do from home), although I probably would have taken the worst day off if I'd known in the morning how bad it was going to get, and in the event I spent much of that afternoon unofficially zonked out on the couch.

In fact, I was weirdly productive at work for the entire rest of the week I was in isolation... and have continued to be weirdly productive since. Something about it, perhaps the combination of being well enough to get a reasonable amount done but ill enough to have no guilt about not getting more done, seems to have reset the way my brain handles work-related stress. I've had an ongoing problem with procrastination, where if I wasn't sure how to start tackling a big or unusual job I'd avoid doing it, and then I'd feel guilty about putting it off and that made me avoid it even harder, and then it would be weeks later and it still wasn't done. But that set of brain weasels seems to have gone away, or at least quietened down a lot, and in the past few weeks I've successfully tackled several big tasks; not always immediately, sometimes I've decided that I'm not up to that today, but then instead of going into a guilt spiral I've been able to look at it again the next day and think, yes, today I am up to it. I don't know if this is going to last, but I'm glad of it while it does.

In other news, I have now read all of Raymond Chandler's novels, including the last one, Playback, which I had not read before. I found it disappointing, which may have been due to bringing inappropriate expectations of what it meant to be The Last One. And to be fair it was always going to have a tough act to follow coming after The Long Goodbye. But The Long Goodbye has one of the best endings in the series, and would have been a strong ending for the series, and Playback failed to convince me that it had anything to offer that made it worth giving that up.

I didn't manage to complete the reading challenge for June, which was a book with "All" in the title. I started reading a couple of different books that would have qualified, but didn't get very far into any of them. The challenge for July is a book with "Book" (or some other related word such as "Page" or "Library") in the title.

. The reading challenge for April was a book with "Little" or "Big" in the title. I had intended to combine it with my Chandler reading and use The Little Sister, but that's the one Chandler novel I don't own a copy of and I put off going to the library too long, so when I did I found that the library's one copy was out and there wasn't enough month left to wait for it.

So instead I grabbed the first available thing with a suitable title out of my bookmarks on Overdrive, which turned out to be A Little More, a collection of poems and essays by the Tasmanian writer Margaret Scott. I remember her recurring guest appearances on Good News Week (translation for British readers: more or less the Australian version of Have I Got News For You), where she showed a wicked sense of humour hiding within a demure little old lady, but didn't know much about her actual writing. I'm enjoying getting acquainted with it.

The challenge for May is a book with a direction in the title.


. While I was putting off looking for The Little Sister, I read Stolen Skies, the new third novel of Tim Powers's current contemporary fantasy series. I have mixed feelings about it. The premise is intriguing, but three books is the longest he's ever stuck with one setting and set of protagonists, and I'm not convinced it's working; some of the situations are starting to get repetitive, and having generic government agencies as the antagonists is damping down his flair for memorable villains. Part of me wishes that he'd stopped at book two, which ended in a way that would have worked as a satisfying conclusion, and done this premise with a new set of characters. At the same time, since book three does exist, I find myself hoping that he has a fourth book planned; that's partly because the end of book three doesn't work as a satisfying end to the series, and partly because I remember that I wasn't so keen on book one until book two came out and showed where things were going, and I'm hoping he'll repeat the trick with books three and four.


. I also read Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White this month, because I saw it when I was in the library and remembered that I'd been meaning to read it some time. I now understand completely why everyone I know who's read it is so impressed with Marian Halcombe.


. I've been getting back into playing Invisible, Inc lately, and trying to get the hang of the Expert Plus difficulty setting, which is required for three of the four achievements I still hadn't ticked off. Expert Plus difficulty, apart from various incremental tweaks like having more guards in each level, requires some mental rewiring because it takes away one of the key tools available in the lower difficulties. In the lower difficulties, if you can see a part of the room you can see if it's visible to a guard or security camera, but in Expert Plus difficulty you have to be able to see the guard or camera to be able to determine which parts of the room they can see; which is more realistic, but makes entering a new room a much dicier proposition requiring much peering around of corners.


. I mentioned a while back that I've been watching the reaction channel Marie-Clare's World as Marie-Clare works her way through Doctor Who. Back when I last mentioned it, I believe, she was still mostly relying on physical video media, but since then she's switched to streaming it on Britbox. One of the ways this makes a difference is that she's made a habit of avoiding learning the story titles in advance, since now she can just hit the "next episode" button without needing to know what the next episode is called, and also covers her eyes when the title comes up at the beginning of the first episode of each story. That way she gets to watch each story even more spoiler-free than even most of the people who watched it when it first aired. Occasionally this has dramatic results, such as when she recently watched "The Five Doctors" with absolutely no idea of what she was getting into and got increasingly emotional as it became apparent what was happening.

. Rock of Ages is only a few years old, but it's a musical in the classical style -- which is to say that the plot is formulaic and the characters thin, but none of that matters while the songs are happening. After the first read-through of the script, I had a pretty low opinion of it, but after the first vocal rehearsal I was much more kindly disposed.


. I didn't end up reading The High Window in March, deciding instead to focus on finishing off Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and a couple of other books that have been lying about half-read for a while. Now that the decks are cleared, I appear to have started reading The Woman in White instead. I didn't have this much trouble starting The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but then I've read those before and I knew what to expect from them; I haven't read The High Window before and it appears to be getting stuck in the general reluctance to Start New Things.


. It took me a few months to get through Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, but not because I didn't enjoy it; it's a dense read, not to be gulped down too quickly or when the mind is already full of other things. This is a book about the present being built on the bones of the past. The plot has Smilla uncovering a sequence of events stretching back to the second world war, and ultimately caused by something that happened much longer ago. At the same time, the novelist is uncovering, a bit at a time, the events that made Smilla into the person she is. For each of the people she meets along the way, we're given a glimpse of what made them the people they've become. It reminds me of John le Carré's thrillers, which are similarly portraits of people under pressure. (And, like a lot of le Carré's novels, it doesn't tidy everything away neatly and happily at the end. I found that it gave good enough answers to the most important questions, and that I could live with the uncertainties that remained, but this isn't a universal experience.)


. Over the past while, I've been importing my reading log into StoryGraph. Since the first decade of my reading log exists only on paper, this has involved a fair amount of typing, some opportunities to bathe in nostalgia, and occasionally squinting at an entry and muttering, "That's weird, I don't remember that book at all." I've also learned a thing or two about International Standard Book Numbers, including how the typo protection works and how to translate the old 10-digit ISBN into a modern 13-digit ISBN (not to mention an exciting side-trip involving my copy of Tarzan of the Apes, which is so old it only has a 9-digit SBN).


. After a long hiatus occasioned by various life events and scheduling conflicts, our roleplaying group has resumed meeting more-or-less regularly and has got back into the investigation we were in the middle of before things ground to a halt. In our most recent playing session, we started investigating a lighthouse that had been left abandoned(?) after the occupants were attacked in the middle of renovating it. I figured out a way of climbing up the outside of the lighthouse and getting in at the top, a strategy that had served us well for getting past the guards last time we needed to investigate a tower; unfortunately on this occasion it turned out the scenario had been designed to provide an increasing challenge level as the players worked their way up, so going in from the top meant running straight into the most difficult set of opponents in the lighthouse. I was obliged to retreat back down the side of the lighthouse and rejoin the rest of the party, and we used the front door instead.

I've finished reading Our Mutual Friend. With all the characters and subplots, it takes a while to get going, but the way everything pays off is very satisfying.

I was amused by the author's note at the end saying that he anticipated that many readers and commentators would consider John Rokesmith's backstory to be what modern audiences would call a spoiler, when in fact he'd put a lot of effort into hinting at it so that an alert reader could figure it out. He goes on to say that there's another strand of the plot that he did attempt "to keep for a long time unsuspected, yet always working itself out... and turning it to a pleasant and useful account at last"; he doesn't say which it is, though I have a couple of suppositions.

The reading challenge for March is "a book with a location in the title". I've used that as an impetus to finish off Sig: City of Blades finally, so I've got the rest of the month to my own devices. (It's not that I wasn't enjoying it, it's just that it wasn't a high priority so I kept putting it aside for other things.) I've also set myself a goal of reading one Philip Marlowe novel a month; this month's is The High Window, which will mean that next month, when the Buzzword challenge is "Little or Big", I can use The Little Sister to knock off two birds with one stone.

Fiction books
Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep (re-read)
Neil Gaiman, Chris Riddell. The Sleeper and the Spindle
Kim Newman. Something More Than Night (e)
Catherynne M Valente. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

In progress
Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist (e)
Peter Høeg, tr. F David. Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
Jason Pitre. Sig: City of Blades

Non-fiction books in progress
David Attenborough. Zoo Quest for a Dragon

Abandoned
Matt Parker. Humble Pi (due back at the library)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Tim Powers. Stolen Skies (e)

Fiction books
(anthology). Batman Black and White volume 2
Kurt Busiek, Brent Eric Anderson, Will Blyberg. Astro City: Confession
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener. Atomic Robo and the Shadow From Beyond Time
Warren Ellis, John Cassaday. Planetary: Crossing Worlds
Warren Ellis, John Cassaday. Planetary: The Fourth Man
Warren Ellis, John Cassaday. Planetary: Leaving the 20th Century
Warren Ellis, Darrick Robertson. Transmetropolitan: Lust For Life
Warren Ellis, Darrick Robertson. Transmetropolitan: Lonely City
Warren Ellis, Darrick Robertson. Transmetropolitan: The New Scum
Warren Ellis, Darrick Robertson. Transmetropolitan: Year of the Bastard
John M Ford. The Dragon Waiting
John M Ford. The Princes of the Air
Diana Wynne Jones. Enchanted Glass
Diana Wynne Jones. The Game
Joe Masteroff, Fred Ebb. Cabaret
Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant. All Star Superman volume 1
Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant. All Star Superman volume 2
Dennis Palumbo. City Wars
Anthony Price. The Alamut Ambush
Steve Purcell. Sam & Max: Surfin' the Highway
Osamu Tezuka. Astro Boy: Volume 3 (re-read)
Naoki Urasawa, et al. Pluto: 007 (re-read)
Naoki Urasawa, et al. Pluto: 008

In progress
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace

Non-fiction books
Russell T Davies, Benjamin Cook. The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter
Paul Dini, Chip Kidd. Batman Animated

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Louisa M Alcott. Little Women

Fiction books
Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep
Gail Carson Levine. Ella Enchanted
Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli. Batman: Year One
Alan Moore, Zander Cannon, Gene Ha. Top 10 volume 2
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener. Atomic Robo and the Fightin' Scientists of Tesladyne
Ursula Vernon. Digger Volume Four
Roger Zelazny. A Night in the Lonesome October

Non-fiction books
Stephen Dando-Collins. Caesar's Legion (didn't finish; authorial voice problems)
Ursula Vernon. It made Sense at the Time...

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Cherry Wilder. Second Nature